return to indexE-mail me at kwoolsey@netcom.com
I had a couple of questions and some feedback with respect togammonline.
First, I wonder about making some of the monthly quiz problems morebasic. As a strong, but not expert, player I constantly make cube andchecker errors that Snowie graciously points out after a match. Sometimes it makes sense to me in retrospect, but sometimes it doesn't. I'd love to see some commentary on a checker play or cube decision thatmight seem obvious to an expert, but that less skilled players mightblunder over. Having experts debate several moves with very littleequity difference between them may not always help with some of the morebasic problems. WHY would you cube, or pass, or take in this position? WHY is it better to break this anchor to hit, or to sit tight? If you'relooking for some of this "dumb mistake" material, I'm a rich source! :-)
In a similar vein, I'd love to see an article on bearing in in a race. I adopted Magriel's general strategy of focusing on the 4,5,and 6 pointsin my home board, but find that Snowie often considers my moves to besignificant errors. Could a modern approach to bearing in be addressedmeaningfully in a gammonline article?
Keep up the good work.
Thanks,
Mat Clark
What is obvious to one player may be quite difficult to another, and it isnot necessarily the "expert" who finds the play obvious. I try to chooseproblems for the monthly quiz as plays which I found puzzling. It is notnecessarily true that the candidates have small equity differences. Sometimesone play turns out to be significantly better than the other when rolledout, yet it is not apparent that this is the case. The value in the analysesof the panelists is to see what expert players think about when attemptingto assess a position. However for any given play each player must make hisown judgment, and an intermediate player may judge correctly while an expertgets it wrong.
Don't take everything Snowie says as gospel. That is a big mistake. WhileSnowie is a fine backgammon player, there are certain types of positionswhich it simply doesn't handle well. Bringing checkers home in preparationfor the race happens to be one of them. Snowie often recommends playswhich are clearly awful in this area. Simply follow what you know are goodgeneral principles here and you will be playing correctly. Just becauseSnowie thinks a move is correct doesn't make it correct.
Kit Woolsey
What advice would you have for a backgammon player who wanted toprogress from being a mid-level expert (~1900 FIBS rating) to beingworld class level player?
I found it pretty easy to get to expert level, by learning generalconcepts (safe play vs. bold play, don't leave your anchor, etc.) andplaying [lots] while thinking about those general concepts.
But over the last year or so, I've been having a hard time making anymore progress. It seems there are no more useful general concepts tolearn. Don't get me wrong, I realize there is plenty about this gamethat I don't have a good grasp on, but all of it seems like veryspecific things (when to run that last checker to try to save the gammonwhen playing a well timed ace point game, when to give up your 8 pointto hit loose when your opponent has one checker back, etc.) and anysingle one of these ideas doesn't come up very often.
Maybe I simply don't have a good enough grasp on the general concepts ofbackgammon to tackle these little issues, but it doesn't seem that way.When a position calls for a bold play, it still often begs the question,"How bold? Bold enough to give up my eight point?" (for example)
I try to learn as many of these specific things (when to run, when togive up the 8 point) as possible, but I find it very hard to keep themall in my head at once, so I wonder if I'm approaching the problem ofbecoming world class in the right way. Is it important to keep a wholebunch of little rules in your head, as I have been trying to do, or isit better to simply try to get an impeccable grasp of only the generalconcepts and hope that that grasp can point you to the right answeralmost all the time?
Any advice is greatly appreciated.
Alex Zamanian
Difficult questions with no easy answers. Each individual learns and thinksin a different way, and you have to do what works best for you. Backgammonis not a game of precision for the most part. While it is sometimes possibleto demonstrate that move A is better than move B in simple positions, in thosemurky difficult positions which separate the winners from the losers thereis never a clear right or wrong which can be determined by over the boardanalysis. Only judgment and experience can guide you through these positions.
Keep in mind that even the best players in the world are far from perfect.Backgammon is just too difficult a game. You can go through matches betweenexperts and find one huge blunder after another. While some of these mayhave been oversights, the majority of them are simply the expert notweighing the priorities correctly for the position at hand.
My own approach is to have a lot of good general principles to guide me, butto examine the position and just see what feels right in light of theseprinciples. Our brains store and process a lot of information, and oftenwe can tell which move looks best even if we aren't able to demonstrateexactly why. After all, aren't we just neural nets ourselves?
Kit Woolsey